An attempt to help explain the mysteries and magic that are part and parcel of 'probation'.

Thursday, 17 October 2013

Omnishambles On Track!

As Napo delegates head off to the Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno for their AGM, there's news that Chris Grayling's TR omnishambles is progressing well on all fronts. First there's a stark warning from the Prison Governor's Association that a recent spike in prison numbers, coupled with prison closures, are putting the whole system in jeopardy. Alan Travis in the Guardian writes:-Prison governors have warned that a sudden rise in the jail population in England and Wales is threatening the stability of the system.

The governors say the spike in the number of inmates, to 84,832, has led to some jails reaching their capacity just as the justice secretary,Chris Grayling, has ordered prison closures.

Eoin Mclennan-Murray, the president of the Prison Governors Association (PGA), told the Guardian he was concerned that an increase of 635 in prisoner numbers had come over the past four weeks, when four prisons had just been earmarked for closure.

He said that the usable capacity of the prison system in England and Wales stood at 86,058 places, but many spare cells were in young offenders' institutions and women's prisons, and were unsuitable for adult male prisoners. The most acute pressures were being felt in south-west England and the West Midlands.

"This may well lead to prisons locking out [holding inmates elsewhere] and the requirement to use police cells," said a PGA statement. "In some cases, this has already happened."

The prison governors, who are holding their annual conference, issued a statement saying they had "serious concerns" over the situation: "This spike in prison numbers present[s] a significant threat to the stability of the prison estate at a time of prison closures and reduced staffing numbers brought about by benchmarking and restructure. This is accompanied by a number of prisons reaching capacity."

The PGA president said the political decision to accelerate the closure of four prisons had made the situation particularly acute as their inmates had to be accommodated within the spare capacity elsewhere.

Interestingly, it looks like we will not be able to learn the reasons why the closure of HMP Blundeston is necessary because the report will not be made public by MoJ/Noms.Then there's the very thorough coverage by Russell Webster of how the MoJ Justice Data Lab just isn't delivering the goods:-

The purpose of the Justice Data Lab was to make it possible for small voluntary organisations to find out if their work with offenders made a difference to reoffending rates.

It was launched as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation project as a way of government, commissioners and Prime providers having a way of comparing the impact of different providers delivering a range of interventions.

Despite the strong publicity surrounding the launch of the Data Lab, with voluntary sector providers encouraged strongly to believe that participation would stand them in good stead to win business in the TR probation reforms, there were only 52 submissions in the first six months operation.

Seven of these have been fully answered.

Seven could not be answered because organisations were unable to provide the minimum criteria – (basically name, date of birth, gender, sentence type and date of sentence if possible).

The rest are still being processed.

Even with the seven requests which were answered, the MoJ struggled to match offenders in most cases.

Offenders were matched in 799 out of 3335 cases – just under a quarter of cases.

To be fair to the Data Lab, they have set the minimum data requirements very low and several organisations were unable to provide the basic information on a large proportion of the caseload.

In other cases, it’s not possible to tell whether it was the voluntary sector organisation or the MoJ whose data were not properly recorded.

But the biggest disappointment is that so far the Data Lab has been able to tell us very little about what works in reducing reoffending:

There is insufficient evidence to assess the impact on reoffending of entering a Koestler Award

There is insufficient evidence to assess the impact on reoffending of completing the Sycamore Tree Project

There is insufficient evidence to assess the impact on reoffending of the Family Man course run by Safe Ground

The reoffending rate for prisoners released from HMP Armley who saw the Shelter housing advice service was higher than the control group – but the control group wasn’t matched for homelessness/accommodation issues.

Apparently various voluntary groups working with offenders seem to have difficulty with basic data such as name, gender, date of birth etc., and I love the MoJ explanation for this level of data 'attrition'. It really just confirms that we really do have all the elements necessary for an omnishambles of truely epic proportions here:-

When matching to administrative datasets, it is likely that not all individuals will be matched. This is called attrition, and may be due to a variety of reasons.The Justice Data Lab is a service providing a new use of administrative data, and it is clear that a reasonable level of attrition is occurring when matching between an organisation’s individual level data, and the administrative data held by the Ministry of Justice. Reasons for the attrition are given below:

The minimum criteria to match individuals has not been provided (name, date of birth, gender etc);

The identifying information about the individual may not be the same as what is held on the administrative databases (name, date of birth,gender etc) meaning that we could not be confident about the match;

There may be more than one individual with the same identifying information, and it is not possible to establish which identity is correct;

Information about the sentence (including sentence type) does not match what is held on the administrative records to an extent where we cannot be confident that a re-offending follow up would be appropriate;

Individuals who were targeted in custody may have still been in custody after 31st December 2010 – currently the last date in the Data Lab where re-offending data can be calculated from;

The individuals cannot be matched to offenders with similar characteristics.

By the way, this is what the omnishambles is supposed to look like when it's finished:-

During his appearance at the Justice affairs Committee yesterday, Chris Grayling was reminded what Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger had said only the day before in a speech about cuts in criminal legal aid, and reported here in the Independent:-

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has been accused of having “no regard” for expert views after the UK's most senior judge warned against proposed legal aid cuts.

Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger said in a lecture that cutting legal aid will deprive the people who most need the protection of the courts or the ability to get legal representation.

Confronted with the judge's comments during a Justice Committee hearing, Mr Grayling said he would be surprised if Lord Neuberger thought the cutbacks were "a good thing".

After reading the judge's comments, Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd said: "Have you no regard for experts in the field?"

Mr Grayling replied: "I would be surprised if the president of the Supreme Court was saying legal aid cutbacks are a good thing.

As this post on the public law for everyone blogsite makes clear, such an attack by a very senior judge indeed is very unusual, but politicians would do well to take note:-

Ten years ago, when the Labour Government was on the verge of attempting to prevent judicial review of immigration and asylum decisions, Lord Woolf, in a lecture which I attended at the University of Cambridge, warned that if politicians persisted in failing to respect the proper role of the courts, they would succeed only in making the case for a written constitution that would prevent the improper marginalization of the judicial branch. Sensibly, the Blair Government heeded Lord Woolf’s warning and stepped back from the brink. The Coalition Government’s policies constitute a less explicit, but nonetheless real and insidious, threat to access to justice. Current Ministers would do well to heed Lord Neuberger’s warning, just as their predecessors heeded Lord Woolf’s.

The so-called 'consultation' between staff and employers ordered by MoJ/Noms HQ has just about concluded and the general consensus is that it's been a complete waste of time and effort due to lack of information and the documents being in draft form only.

I see that Pat Waterman, Chair of Greater London Napo branch, has written to all members advising them of over 300 questions that have been put to the employers, but as yet there have been no answers.............

PS For further analysis of the Justice Data Lab statistics, see this blog post on the 'aged member speaks' site and the exciting announcement launching the Institute for the Study of Spurious Statistics (i3S).

12 comments:

Just a little snippet from a plebgate article in the Telegraph. I get the feeling that Grayling couldn't buy a friend anywhere at the moment.

There are, in addition, numerous cases where strong allegations have been made that the police have fabricated evidence to get a conviction. The resulting civil prosecutions tend to get settled out of court, so that you never get a judgment clearly stating that the officers were lying.This is all going to get a great deal worse now that Chris Grayling (whom I suppose we must continue to refer to by his formal office as Lord Chancellor) is slashing legal aid and making judicial review financially unfeasible. Britain today has a two-tier legal system, just like health and education. You can either buy your way to expensive advice, or rely on state-funded representation. This works fine when the police can be trusted to tell the truth. But when they are prepared to lie it becomes a different matter.

Ahhhhh! Mr Grayling - the man with no integrity or real understanding of the world - treats the Supreme Court President with contempt - just like everyone else, at least he's consistent - in his foolery.

It would be ice if NAPO Conference could recognise the work done by Jim in keeping this excellent blog. In these times of smoke, mirrors and bullshit it has proved the ONLY source of information for some and, judging from the many posts, an invaluable outlet for others wishing to express views. Once upon a time NAPO would have provided that role, but I suspect there's a lack of trust issue after NAPO-gate. Conference has a lot of ground to make up with its members. Don't blow this one as well.I'd hope that Conference will shed some more light on TOM & pam and the shadowy goings-on at MoJ in securing IT contracts outwith what appears to have been any competitive tendering process (pam).

Although its nothing that probation doesn't already know, I find it heartening when the information and sentiment that is expressed in this blog is expressed in the national press and brought to the wider publics attention. I also on a personal level enjoy it when Grayling and Outsourcing get a clobbering in the same text.

We all know about Sercos underhand dealings and fraud with government contracts. Soon they will be smiling and putting their greedy little hands out trying to win probation contracts. But do we know about ALL their corrupt dealings? I for one was not aware of this one:-

Thanks again to Jim Brown for yet another high standard blog that provides links to probation folk for much else that is available on the Internet about Probation and provides high quality informed comment on what seems to be happening AND encourages contributions from others with things to say and information about probation.

I hope the added publicity from folk attending the Napo AGM and Conference at Llandudno from today until Saturday will bring even more readers and contributors.

Folk are beginning to Tweet from the Conference using the hash tag: -

#Napo13

I hope others will do likewise and keep those not there in person in touch and able to respond as well.

What I particularly liked about today's entry is the reminder - some may need that a future Labour Party led government cannot be assumed to be a safe one for probation and the justice system - they have done some VERY bad and dangerous things in the past and are not good legislators having passed the 2007 Offender Management Act that the enables the current Conservative and Liberal Democrat government by abusing the intentions of the OMA2007 to introduce the very dangerous and ultimately flawed oxymoron styled, Transforming Rehabilitation, programme.

"Due to the high level of interest as a result of the published OJEU notice and the subsequent number of clarification questions asked by providers in preparing their responses, the Authority has taken the decision to allow an additional 14 calendar days for responses to be finalised. The deadline for submission of Pre-Qualification Questionnaires will now be 12 noon on Thursday, 14 November 2013." Bollox ......not enough to make a competition more like !!!!!!!!!!

"What was great is that Napo's AGM isn't a delegate conference. Anyone can come and participate and are encouraged to do so. First time speakers are applauded for having a go. This was the closest I've seen to Ancient Greek democracy in action."

From Blog of new Napo AGS - Dean Rogers - THIS Post would benefit from a tweak, as far as the 'delegate' word is concerned!

It's My Blog

Welcome to the wonderful world of probation! These are the personal thoughts of an ordinary probation officer struggling to come to terms with constant change, whilst trying to do a useful job for society. Sadly, change is so often obviously not progress. I am fully aware that my views do not represent official policy of government, my Service or possibly anyone else - but hey - it's my blog!

ATV 1962 Windsor Davies

About Me

A grumpy, disillusioned, CQSW trained, generic, main grade probation officer based in a small English town. All my contemporaries have either left, retired or been promoted. Newer colleagues simply don't understand the journey I've been on from advise, assist and befriend. (If there is anyone of similar name in the NAPO handbook, it's not me).